Top Stories: Flu Fever Hits The Granite State; Running Through Time On The Sandwich Notch Rd.

The influenza season started much earlier this year and the strain is considered more severe. Many worry how much of a toll this will take. In New Hampshire, at least twenty people have died from the flu already.

There aren’t many roads that have books written about them, but we have one in New Hampshire. In 1973, writer Elizabeth Yates published “The Road Through Sandwich Notch”, which more than anything else helped secure the road’s preservation status as a part of the White Mountain National Forest.

Almost 35 years ago the American Marten was one of the first animals to be put on the state’s threatened species list, but now the slinky member of the weasel family is making a comeback. The question is how big a comeback and on a January morning with the temperature someplace around twenty below, Alexej Siren is getting ready to work on that.

On any given evening in Manchester, roughly 50 people sleep in hidden camps, under bridges, in cars and inside abandoned buildings. Despite the extreme cold, last night was no exception. It was also the night a group of volunteers fanned out to count homeless people as part of an annual census.

Danny Gregory is an author and illustrator whose work you might have seen in the New York Times or other publications. He’s also author of several books, including “An Illustrated Life” and “The Creative License.” His newest is called “A Kiss Before You Go: A Memoir Of Love And Loss”. It’s a collection of illustrations and text compiled from daily drawings Danny did in the year following the death of his wife Patti.

Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel, takes the stage to discuss his latest foray into a field he has made his own -- a biological analysis of human history.

From the youth spent at Philips Exeter Academy that pervades his body of work, through his studies with Kurt Vonnegut at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop – known for producing authors the like of Pulitzer winners John Cheever and Philip Roth - John Winslow Irving has emerged as a true literary heavyweight, distinctly American of voice, and one of the most influential cultural exports to come out of New Hampshire.